FISHES IN MODERN FOLK-LORE. 87 



a large area of Europe, but also in America. A corre- 

 spondent of Notes and Queries gives an account of a similar 

 practice in America. " One morning, during the fall of the 

 year 1875," he writes, " I was wandering along the banks 

 of the Schuykill river, when a young woman, carrying a 

 child two years old, approached two anglers, and asked 

 one of them for a fish he had caught. Receiving it, she 

 seated herself on the bank, deliberately oi^ening the child's 

 mouth, and, thrusting in the head of the fish, held it there, 

 despite the child's struggles, for the space of a minute or 

 more. She then threw it into the river." A turtle is a 

 regular medicine chest. " The stone from its eye " is a 

 specific for ophthalmia ; its legs will, by simple application, 

 cure varicose veins ; its shell, powdered up with some of its 

 liver, affords an antidote to various poisons. But even in 

 this aspect alone, the medicinal fish-lore is far too vast for 

 more than this meagre recognition here. 



Of the origin of fishes, folk-lore is full of information of 

 its own kind. That birds were once fish I have already 

 noticed, and now that the palaeontologists are agreed that 

 the Iguanodon, that mighty eft, walked like a bird on 

 two legs " in his oolitic pride and his bloom," the French 

 tradition may help forward the derivation of the birds from 

 the fishes through the great sea-lizards. 



Eels arc to be accounted for in various ways. When the 

 Brittany fishermen happen to catch the " lotte " they throw 

 them back into the water, as they are supposed to turn 

 into eels. In England they are supposed (as in Yorkshire) 

 to be bred from dew in the months of May and June, or 

 (as in Derbyshire) from the hairs of horses or kine which 

 drop into cart-ruts, or into drinking-troughs and springs, 

 and there quicken after rain. The origin of this belief is 



